I like Pelican. It's Python and has been around for forever so I don't have to roll my own. I realized after a while that I was rewriting Pelican for no particular benefit and the things I thought were limitations of the tool were just my inability to see how to interface with it.
There is no benefit whatsoever in me rolling my own tech unless it actually allows me to do something I can't do otherwise, and a lack of imagination has been my biggest limiting factor.
Once I saw this I also stopped trying to reimplement Django from scratch too. But, doing these custom and also abandoned own website rolling projects did teach me a lot about how Django and Pelican work!
There is no benefit whatsoever in me rolling my own tech unless it actually allows me to do something I can't do otherwise, and a lack of imagination has been my biggest limiting factor.
Once I saw this I also stopped trying to reimplement Django from scratch too. But, doing these custom and also abandoned own website rolling projects did teach me a lot about how Django and Pelican work!